Barack Obama's most troubling tendency

"The program of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor…All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies, perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters perhaps even — so it was occasionally rumoured in some hiding place in Oceania itself."

1984 by George Orwell

In the passage above, and throughout 1984 and Animal Farm, George Orwell illustrates how regimes with tentative hold over beleaguered populations deflect anger away from their own corruptions and mistakes with the deployment of a greatly embellished, even invented, external enemy.

There are many things that bug me about Barack Obama — the insane laundry list speeches, the silly rhetoric, the hostility to the free market — but these are all talked about. He has another habit that hasn't been talked about so much and, of all the things he does, it makes me the most queasy.

It's pretty subtle, but I think it's worth keeping an eye on because, if it were to become full-blown, it has the potential to be the most socially damaging element of his presidency.

I'm talking about what I'm going to call his Goldstein-ism, his tendency to make veiled, dark allusions to a recently vanquished "other", an evil being (he is never specific) who is, he always implies, the real cause of all our problems.

I've seen it in every speech — the peevishness, veiled gibes, and rhetoric that distorts the historical record. I commented about Obama's tendency to make vague references to an evil strawman in a 29 Jan. post following Obama's interview on Al-Arabiya. On Monday Karl Rove devoted a column to the president's "troubling" and "persistent use of the [strawman] device." Rove pointed, for example, to a recent speech in which "Obama said that America's economic difficulties resulted when 'regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market.' " But "Who gutted which regulations?," asked Rove.

Monday was full of terrible economic news. It was another day of "unstoppable selling on Wall Street," according to AP, a day in which Foreign Policy said " the markets were sending an unambiguous signal that the U.S. economy is now headed in the wrong direction." How did the administration respond?

I do not think it a coincidence that late in the day the administration "threw open the curtain on years of Bush-era secrets" as the ever in-the-tank Associated Press put it, with the release of memos "that claimed exceptional search-and-seizure powers…"

Soooo, what was in these scary-sounding memos? Midway down the article AP explains that the memos detailed possible legal rationale for tactics the Bush admin was considering using in its anti-terror program. You'd have to read further still to see that the "Bush administration eventually abandoned many of the legal conclusions." Nevertheless, AP harrumphs, "the documents themselves [about stuff that had been discussed] had been closely held." But who cares what the article actually said: It generated a nice headline — "Obama releases secret Bush anti-terror memos" — during a day the populace might have been thinking disloyal thoughts about the their president's direction.